I don't play well with others

For years I've known that I sometimes don't work well with others; this wouldn't be much of a probably if it was every now and again, but for me it is something I have to work on all the time. I was thinking about this the other day and figured out when this started happening. It was my senior year in college when I had an internship and had to work with a QA person. This QA person had no clue about consumer software and if it didn't work right for him, it wouldn't pass. The problem with this is that he was testing from a lab where he had to dial a 9 to get an outside line where our product was targeted at the home user that just had to dial a number (the product setup a dial up networking account). So we kept having to write code to get QA to pass it. This annoyed me to no end because this person just didn't seem competent to me and actually hindered the product (he wasn't the only person that hindered it; whoever setup the deal did some poor negotiating). This wasn't my last time having to write code to get QA to get off my back.

I was OK for awhile as I dealt with people that I thought were competent, but whenever I ran into someone that I didn't think was competent, things got messy. I won't say that I'm a genius (OK, maybe I am :-)), but I'm able to think through problems very quickly and when people can't keep up or don't come to a conclusion as quickly as I do, I get frustrated and it makes me look like I'm not a team player. In addition, I have a very good memory (knock on wood), so I recall conversations, email messages, web sites I visited, etc. So if someone asks me a question that I know has been answered already and they received a copy of the answer, I'm very quick to jump on him. If I don't recall the answer or don't know the answer, I know how to quickly find the answer; something that whoever asked the question should be able to do, in most cases. The Internet is a very powerful tool if you know how to use it.

To make matters worse, I believe that every engineering project should make money (I basically learned this in college; no sense investing resources in something that is dead from the start). This point got me into trouble as well as I can't recall the number of projects I've been on where from the get go, management knew the project wouldn't make money, but continued to invest time and money into it for years.

This problem has delayed a promotion for me and many times made me want to get up and leave what I'm doing. It's a good thing I work for myself now, otherwise, I'm sure my boss would have fired me a long time ago! While I don't think I'll ever overcome this issue, I'm always working on it. I like working with the best of the best and unfortunately I don't always have that option.

The nice thing about writing my own software is that I only have one person to blame and that's me. I try to be as courteous as possible to my customers, but frankly, some people are just too clueless to use my software even if my current products are easy enough for my parents to use (my parents aren't dumb, but sometimes aren't the most computer savvy). Some customers really try my patience and in the end, sometimes they are right, but in many cases I feel like a broken record.

Testing out Camino

For the last few days, I've been playing with Camino as my default web browser. For my new help system, it has some components that rely on Firefox (for editing knowledgebase articles), so I wanted to give Firefox a try. Unfortunately Firefox doesn't look like a Mac application. Camino is supposed to be a Mac-ified version of Firefox, so I decided to give it a try. While it's better than Firefox in terms of being a Mac application, it still has some weird behaviors. It appears to be faster than Safari and seems to be functioning well. I imported my bookmarks and since I'm using 1Passwd for storing passwords to websites, the transition was easy. One bug that is kind of annoying is there are 2 checkboxes for Passwords; "Allow saving in the Keychain" and "Auto fill passwords in web forms". Unfortunately they don't work properly. With 1Password, I fill in my passwords with it so I turned off Auto fill passwords in Safari and now Camino. In Safari, the HTTP Authentication passwords still got filled in, but web forms didn't get filled in. Camino, however, requires that "Auto fill passwords in web forms" be turned on to fill in web forms as well as HTTP Authentication passwords.

I should probably just download the source and fix it, but the last time I touched anything related to Mozilla, it made my head spin and I found some source I had written when I was at Qualcomm that was used without retaining the copyright message (the original source I wrote is still available).

The jury is still out on if I'll keep using Camino, but the speed and better support for editing in Cerberus and my blog (both use TinyMCE). We'll see.

New technical support system

This week, I installed (actually I had someone else install it as he had experience doing it and it only took him 30 minutes) a new technical support system for ReceiptWallet and DocumentWallet. I decided that I needed a more dynamic way to update my FAQ and better handle technical support inquiries as many of them are the same types of questions. For the last few weeks, one of my clients has been evaluating a new CRM system as it has outgrown its current system. I've been following along to see what would work for me and nothing that was being evaluated met my needs. So, I started looking at its current system, Cerberus, and found that it actually could work for me. They have a free version which I had installed and for now, it seems to meet my needs. If I need more, the $200 fee for small businesses is pretty reasonable in my opinion. So, check out my support site and see how the end user portion works. The backend that I use to respond to support tickets also seems to be working well. There is one bug in the user interface that I've been unable to fix (source is included), but that's minor.

I hope to grow into this help system and have enough sales to bring someone else in to answer support inquiries. I'll be ready for it, when (not if) the time comes!

Fringe benefits?

The other day there was an article in our local paper about how Google has setup a transportation system to shuttle some of its employees to and from work. In addition, they provide free chef cooked meals, doctor checkups, etc.. While this sounds like a great idea, the article clearly quoted a Google employee as saying that these perks allow google to get a few extra hours a day out of each employee. So instead of employees working 8 hour days, these "perks" make them work 10-12 hour days. Hmmm...seems to me that they should pay employees more, but these perks probably cost less than paying their employees more. Google contact me a few weeks ago about a job in Colorado. Leave San Diego? For chef prepared meals (I'm not sure if the non Silicon Valley offices get the same perks)? I think I'll stick where I am. 8 hour work days (OK a few more as I'm self employed) as all I can handle.